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One of irks I have with "slight visual cues and subtle animations" is that they assume all users will give the same amount of attention and have the same reasoning process as the designer does. They then call the design "obvious", as if that is an objective quality---but even a short conversation (or usability study) with a sample of their users will tell them it's anything but.

It's roughly the same as the improved GCC error message ("index out of range"), but with only 29 extra lines of incomprehensible compiler meandering and stdlib internals!

The authors of Touché did a follow-up paper at UIST this year to study this exact question [1]. In brief, you can train a classifier on the impedance profile of specific users, but there are some significant limitations (impedance profiles naturally drift over time, and accuracy doesn't look so good with a lot of users).

[1] http://chrisharrison.net/projects/capacitivefingerprinting/C...

That's a patent application, which was rejected earlier this year in light of a prior IBM patent (http://www.google.com/patents/US5463725) and another of Apple's (http://www.google.com/patents/US7469381).

I'm a little surprised to see the NY Times perpetuating the hysteria that typically follows patent issues with exaggeration of their scope and claims.

This is a design patent, meaning that Apple has protection for this specific animation and not page-turn animations in general. Note that many of the references cited (a good one is the O'Reilly article from 2004) depict page-turn animations, but differ from this specific one.

I suspect the lack of any tactile/haptic feedback introduces a small refractory period between keys/letters.

Sure; physical chording keyboards have been around for decades: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chording_keyboard

The description isn't very detailed, but where do these strings come from, and what's the licence for using them?

The article is very light on details about how the "study" arrived at their conclusions and figures (I hesitate to call it a study, because it didn't actually test any hypotheses).

The report is published by a group that lobbies for "copyright reform that enables fair access to content", with a membership is predominantly tertiary institutes.

They argue that a number of industries are dependent on some "limitations and exceptions" to copyright law. These industries include: research and education, publishing, broadcasting, film, music, ISPs, and the performing arts. The industries currently employ some people, make some money, and contribute some amount to GDP. Their extend of this dependence on copyright limitations is not quantified by thre report and is quite vague (focussing mainly on quotation, citation, and critique).

It concludes that if Australia implements "better crafted limitations and exceptions", these industries can increase their job/income/GDP metrics, and reduce the amount paid as licensees of copyright protected works to foreign companies.

Apple's original claim didn't have that "loophole", but added it after the patent office rejected the original version as being anticipated by prior art (specifically, a patent [1] and a patent application [2]).

[1] http://www.google.com/patents/US7576732

[2] http://www.google.com/patents?id=gKyRAAAAEBAJ

Keep reading...

"If an app continues to perform some function when the main window is closed, it might be appropriate to leave it running after the user closes the main window. For example, iTunes continues to play after the user closes the main window."

> Also, the app quits when the last window is closed, which isn't how OS X apps are supposed to behave.

This is almost consistent with Apple's HIG: "In general, quit when users close the last open window in your app. [...] If users close the last remaining document window in a document-based app and switch to another app, it’s appropriate to quit the app" (emphasis added). [1]

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/UserEx...

They use it under licence from Cisco. See: http://www.apple.com/legal/trademark/appletmlist.html

    IOS is a trademark or registered trademark of Cisco in the U.S. and other countries and is used under license.

None of these are lies or even deceit by Apple (apart from a little bit of chartjunk).

Apple may have cherry-picked some particularly complementary surveys/analyses/metrics, but I'm not sure what you'd expect from the keynote of a company's premiere event.

According to its PCT entry [1], it's still making its way through the Australian, Canadian, European, and Japanese patent offices.

1: http://patentscope.wipo.int/search/en/detail.jsf?docId=WO200...

The USPTO publishes its operating manual for examiners on its website. All of chapter 900 deals with prior art and searches for it, but an overview of the process can be found in these sections:

904: http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/documents/0900_904... 904.02: http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/documents/0900_904...

The process examiners use for a specific patent is also documented by them in the file wrapper for every application and is available in PAIR: http://portal.uspto.gov/external/portal/pair

There's now an option in every user's General Account Settings:

    Allow friends to include my email address in Download Your Information.

I'm not sure what the default is, but mine is currently set to "no" (and I don't recall changing it).

The code that generates the completions [1] and displays them [2] is fairly simple. It uses a mix of scanning for a function's docstring, Python's built-in rlcompleter module [3] to generate the possible identifiers and keywords, its own module scanner for imports [4].

[1] https://bitbucket.org/bobf/bpython/src/2b3fb2cb6500/bpython/...

[2] https://bitbucket.org/bobf/bpython/src/2b3fb2cb6500/bpython/...

[3] http://docs.python.org/library/rlcompleter.html

[4] https://bitbucket.org/bobf/bpython/src/2b3fb2cb6500/bpython/...

Don Norman wrote a similar essay titled "The Trouble with UNIX" in 1981 [1], where he praised UNIX as an "elegant system", but criticised its commands for their "incoherent, inconsiderate design".

  The greatest surprise actually is that Unix still lives on, 
  warts and all. The frustrations I experienced in the paper
  were real and still exist today [1987].

In a similar vein, but also quite entertaining, is the UNIX-HATERS Handbook [2].

[1] http://books.google.co.nz/books?id=UqhjMVwYKJsC&lpg=PA25... [2] http://www.simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf

This is a new version of the Samsung i8520 [1], announced/released in 2009/10, but with a lower resolution camera and projector (although that says little about quality).

[1]: http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_i8520_beam-3150.php

I think that the "legitimacy of the US order" refers to the evidence that will be presented to the US grand jury, not the search warrant in New Zealand. The Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters Act [1] requires that the Attorney General be satisfied that the request be related to a foreign criminal matter, but they do not have to ensure that the order would be held up in the US.

[1] http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1992/0086/latest/D...

That's not a patent, it's an unreviewed patent application.

Something he misses is that good documentation isn't just an English translation of what the source code does, it's also a contract that describes what the source code may or may not do now and in the future.

If "the source code is the ultimate truth", then your source code is indelible---you can never change your implementation because you've given users freedom to depend upon the behaviour produced by any line of it. If you don't want people depending on implementation details, then you need documentation to hide those away.

The BOM is optional in UTF-16 too:

  The UTF-16 encoding scheme may or may not begin with a BOM.
  However, when there is no BOM, and in the absence of a 
  higher-level protocol, the byte order of the UTF-16 
  encoding scheme is big-endian.

(D98 in http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.1.0/ch03.pdf)

Perhaps the (formerly) regular release cakes that they exchanged: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox#Response_from_Microsoft

The design philosophy behind much of Objective-C is described in Brad Cox's book "Object-oriented programming: an evolutionary approach" [1]. Unfortunately, I don't have a copy handy to give you a quote.

[1] http://books.google.co.nz/books?id=U8AgAQAAIAAJ

I'm not sure if it's intentional, but there was a Simpsons parallel in "Much Apu About Nothing":

  [Later, a full-force Bear Patrol is on watch.  Homer watches proudly.]

  Homer: Not a bear in sight.  The Bear Patrol must be working like a 
         charm.
   Lisa: That's spacious reasoning, Dad.
  Homer: Thank you, dear.
   Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
  Homer: Oh, how does it work?
   Lisa: It doesn't work.
  Homer: Uh-huh.
   Lisa: It's just a stupid rock.
  Homer: Uh-huh.
   Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around, do you?
          [Homer thinks of this, then pulls out some money]
  Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock.
          [Lisa refuses at first, then takes the exchange]

http://www.snpp.com/episodes/3F20.html

The boundaries of what defines a derivative work is a bit fuzzy, and how much you need to take from a work in order to create new work that would be classified as derivative is open to debate/common law.

Suppose that HP holds a patent related to the keyboard layout in webOS, of which the source code of their implementation is released under the Apache licence. If Apple took that code and mashed it into iOS, it would (I believe) clearly be a derivative work and protected by the licence. But suppose they didn't look at the code (or any material released by HP under the Apache licence), they just saw a picture/read a description of it/used it on a device and implemented it based on those experiences; in this case I think it's difficult to say that Apple's implementation is a derivative (and therefore protected) because of the lack of connection to the Apache-licensed work (except that their code produces the same runtime effect that HP's does, which I don't believe is necessarily covered by the Apache licence as they are separable from the original work).

I think the licence text itself is fairly straightforward (as much as legal agreements can be "straightforward") about it:

     each Contributor hereby grants to You a [forever lasting] 
     patent license to [do anything with] the Work

The key part being "the Work", which is the code (in source or binary form) that's covered by the Apache licence. A derivative work would be covered by this patent licence, but a clean-room re-implementation of a feature would not because you are no longer dealing with "the Work".

That is still a draft document, and has not been accepted as a BCP (Best Current Practice) RFC yet.